Collecting Culture

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Cities themselves are living archives. Their built form and streetscapes are at once prosaic and visually spectacular, messy and ordered, permeable and bounded. As complex, incomplete and ever-changing entities, cities and their cultural infrastructure are the repositories of urban life (Rao 2009). Nevertheless, there are cultural institutions within cities that have explicit mandates to collect, store and exhibit memories, histories and knowledge that become the foundations of state-sanctioned culture. These range in practice from small personal collections to the activist reading rooms and archives of oppositional groups, to state-sanctioned municipal libraries, national archives and metropolitan museums. Within these collections are images, texts and material culture from the past through to the present that are catalogued, indexed and stored for selective display and reinterpretation. In cities, these repositories provide the cultural infrastructure through which to recuperate the past and reimagine urban futures.